When Mitt Romney ran for president in 2012, he called for cuts in federal spending. Sixteen months after he lost, he’s making public pleas for austerity in another arena: the Olympics.

Mr. Romney said Sunday that the International Olympic Committee should take steps to limit spending on the games in the wake of the Sochi Olympics, which are estimated to have cost more than $50 billion.

“Olympic sport can be demonstrated at $2-or-$3 billion,” Mr. Romney said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “All that extra money could be used to do some very important things in terms of fighting poverty and fighting disease around the world.”

Fighting poverty, he said, is where countries should spend their money, instead of “wasting them, in many cases, to show off a country or, I think more cynically, to show off the politicians in a country.”

(Mr. Romney wrote an op-ed on extravagent Olympic bills in USA Today last week

Mr. Romney has some experience in the area. His tenure running the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City–which were mired in a bribery scandal before he took over–served as a key credential in his subsequent runs for office, especially the governorship of Massachusetts later that year. In 2004, he published a book on his experience.

Even the much smaller bill for those games came back to bite Mr. Romney. Democrats attacked him over the $1.3 billion in federal funds that went to the Salt Lake City Olympics and related security and infrastructure.

Mr. Romney remains a supporter of the Olympics. He called hosting the games “a great experience”. And he’s signed on as an advisor to a possible bid by Boston to host the 2024 games. A limit on Olympic spending could actually help that city compete with rivals in countries where autocratic governments can promise billions in spending with little regard for public opinion. In Boston, the cost to taxpayers of hosting the games is already controversial.

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